"Images create conditions for recognition and interpretation... They are records of acts of cognition." Harold Cohen
Harold Cohen’s paper from 1979, What is an Image? anticipates later discussions about algorithms and the status of digital images in visual culture. His claim that images are “records of acts of cognition” shifts attention from representation to process, from what an image shows to how it comes into being. In this sense, AARON’s drawings function less as objects than as events. They can be seen as traces of perceptual reasoning enacted through a machine. Cohen concludes that an image refers to some aspect of the world while simultaneously referring to the cognitive act that produced it. This understanding situates image-making as a reflective activity: not the reproduction of appearances, but the construction of ways of seeing and knowing.
Cohen’s work complicates the opposition between human creativity and technological mediation. AARON does not replace artistic agency; it reveals how structured, rule-based processes underpin all acts of image-making. His use of randomness illustrates this point. Randomness is not introduced to produce surprise but to sustain engagement. This in turn, makes each decision contingent and responsive rather than predetermined. The resulting drawings, though made by a machine, evoke the rhythms of human gesture and attention, suggesting that meaning can emerge from structured interaction rather than from conscious intention alone.
Cohen’s main argument centers on the idea that images do not carry meaning because of what they depict but because of how they organize perception. Meaning arises through what he calls “image-mediated transactions,” the reciprocal relationship between viewer and image. Rather than transmitting fixed messages, images create conditions for recognition and interpretation. Against the notion that photography defines the “normal” form of visual representation, Cohen reasserts drawing as a mode of cognition in which marks gain significance through their internal relationships. In this view, the image is not a representation of the world, but a record of the mental process that recognizes it.
AARON at Tsukuba, #4 26-5-85, 1985